Google is promising the Trump administration that it will end a practice that led to Republican fundraising emails being flagged as “dangerous” spam, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Wire.
The commitment comes after Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson pressed Google over reports that its email platform was filtering emails from Republican fundraising platform WinRed as spam while not applying the same scrutiny to Democrat platform ActBlue. Google pinned the blame for the labeling on its partnership with a third-party company and committed to no longer using that company’s spam list, according to a Friday letter to Ferguson obtained by The Daily Wire.
“Your letter inquires about a recent example of a warning label that appeared on certain emails that included a link from a fundraising organization,” wrote Anne Wall, the head of federal government affairs and public policy for Google. “The label appeared after a third-party company, SURBL, placed that fundraising organization on its abuse list. The organization’s presence on SURBL’s list, combined with other signals, resulted in the warning label.”
SURBL is a corporation based in the Netherlands that compiles an intelligence database used to flag unwanted emails. Wall said that SURBL was just one of the hundreds of “signals” Gmail used to target unwanted messages.
In light of the complaints, she said that Google would no longer use SURBL’s list to weed out spam.
“Google took the concerns raised by the fundraising organization very seriously,” she told Ferguson. “We promptly evaluated whether we could protect Gmail users from unwanted spam without reliance on the SURBL signal, and determined that our own advanced protections are the most effective way to protect users. As a result, we stopped incorporating SURBL as a signal.”
Reached by The Daily Wire, a Google spokesman echoed Wall’s letter, noting that SURBL was used by “dozens of American ISPs, cybersecurity companies and email providers” but that the tech company decided to use its own protections. The spokesman also noted that the Federal Election Commission previously dismissed a similar complaint from Republicans back in January 2023, and a federal judge in California threw out a similar complaint against Google in July 2024.
The concerns about Republican emails being improperly labeled were first flagged last month by the Republican consulting firm, Targeted Victory.
“If Gmail is allowed to quietly suppress WinRed links while giving ActBlue a free pass, it will continue to tilt the playing field in ways that voters never see, but campaigns will feel every single day,” the firm said in a memo, according to the New York Post.
After that report, Ferguson sent a letter to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, warning that the disparate labeling may be a violation of federal law.
“My understanding from recent reporting is that Gmail’s spam filters routinely block messages from reaching consumers when those messages come from Republican senders but fail to block similar messages sent by Democrats,” Ferguson wrote. “If Gmail’s filters keep Americans from receiving speech they expect, or donating as they see fit, the filters may harm American consumers and may violate the FTC Act’s prohibition of unfair or deceptive trade practices.”
Wall told Ferguson that Google appreciated “the importance of political communications, and we remain committed to helping senders — including political senders across the political spectrum — when they experience difficulties with their email campaigns. Indeed, we have regularly worked closely with email senders of all kinds to improve our product and our policies.”